Arctic Sand (Cambridge, Mass.) was founded in 2011 as a spin-off from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is commercializing energy efficient dc-to-dc power conversion chips for multiple markets.

The company claims its Transformative Integrated Power Solutions (TIPS) technology reduces energy losses by 50 percent compared with existing products while occupying a fraction the size.

"A staggering 80 percent of energy generated worldwide is lost as heat due to power-conversion losses," said Nadia Shalaby, CEO and co-founder of Arctic Sand, in a statement. "Such excessive power inefficiency results in both unnecessary electricity expenses and significantly oversized distribution and generation in serving the world's rapidly expanding computing and data storage needs."

Datacenters worldwide spend more than $50 billion on electricity each year and emit more carbon dioxide than the airline industry, said Shalaby. "By cutting power-conversion losses in half and delivering a smaller solution size within the end products, Arctic Sand's technology empowers device manufacturers to recover energy and space – satisfying the increased functionality demands of their customers," Shalaby added.

John Major, chairman of Arctic Sand and a former chairman of Broadcom and former CTO of Motorola, said Arctic Sand's technology also has a potentially transformative effect in the telecom, industrial and mobility markets.

Mark Tyndall, vice president of business development and corporate strategy for Dialog Semiconductor plc, said Arctic Sand's power-conversion platform delivers enhanced energy efficiency along with space and cost savings.

Well, this depends on how broadly they meant it. For example if you include incandescent lighting where most of the energy used is wasted as heat instead of the targeted light, or if you include the energy efficiency of all automobiles, etc., then it might be theoretically OK. But, of course, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand, i.e. DC/DC power conversion and its efficiency. Hence, for sure it is marketing hubris.

Switch mode power supply is known to be high efficiency. As far as I understand DC-DC convertor has efficiency as high as 98%. I guess the 80% means more than power conversion at home and for the devices. It might cover everything end-to-end including through the grid and step down conversion to either 220VAC or 110VAC. 80% still sounds high to me. Love to hear expert from electric company.